Did a fender-bender save my daughter from being trans? Part 1

Part 1

There were signs from the time my daughter Kristin was very young that she was “gender nonconforming,” to some degree. At the time, I didn’t think in those terms, of course. She was born in 2004, back when being a tomboy was still okay and nobody claimed a little girl playing with cars needed to be medicalized. From as young as three, Kristin had her own style and interests, an odd but amusing mix of “girl stuff” and “boy stuff.” She liked pretty dresses and adored absolutely anything involving horses. But she also hated dolls, loved monster trucks, and, for the better part of a year, wore big black “fireman boots” with everything.

In first grade, she told me all her friends were chasing boys during recess, trying to kiss them. She thought it was “dumb,” but then added, “The only person I want to kiss is Alexis.” This was my first clue she might be gay. When she reached middle school, I wasn’t surprised when Kristin told me she liked girls. And when she started hanging out with a bunch of art and theater kids who proudly wore rainbow badges, I wasn’t worried. Frankly, they seemed pretty harmless compared to my own friend group at that age. We dubbed them the Rainbow Crew, a moniker that felt fun and celebratory at first, but which now makes me cringe.

The Rainbow Crew solidified over the course of middle school. It consisted of two boys, five girls, and Thadeus. Thadeus was born female but identified as male with the full, unwavering support of his parents. (I’m going to use Thadeus’ preferred pronouns. I know many will object to that, but after much debate, that’s what I’ve decided to do.)

Thadeus was one year older than Kristin. I never met his parents, but I learned over the next few years that they were (in my opinion) insanely permissive. At fourteen, Thadeus was allowed to smoke pot on a nightly basis. He was allowed to get multiple tattoos. He attended furry conventions and owned not one but two “fursona” suits. And, of course, he was fully supported in his trans identity. He started hormone therapy sometime in middle school.

I felt all of this was rather too lenient, too reckless, too early, but what alarmed me most was how through all of it, Thadeus became The Hero of the Rainbow Crew. Every kid in the group, my daughter included, thought Thadeus was some kind of role model. All activity revolved around what Thadeus wanted and what Thadeus said. In many ways, it seemed to be a low-key cult of personality.

To be clear, Thadeus wasn’t any kind of Mean Girls Regina-style dictator. I met him a handful of times and he came across as a perfectly polite, slightly nerdy kid. But there was no ignoring the fact that by being trans, Thadeus had somehow achieved the pinnacle of coolness. (Even if the kids don’t say “cool” anymore.)

Through those early years of puberty, my daughter blossomed physically, much to her dismay, into a rather large-busted young woman. This inspired a great many comments from the boys in her class. She asked me to buy her a binder.

I was torn about this. On one hand, I wanted her to love her body, as much as any teen girl can. On the other hand, middle-school kids can be cruel, and she clearly hated people focusing on her chest.

I tried to find the middle ground. I agreed to something that was more of a minimizing sports bra. Nothing could truly hide her breasts, but it made them a bit less obvious, and she seemed happy with that. She floated the idea of getting a breast reduction. I told her we’d discuss when she turned 18, but that no surgeon would ever do a breast reduction on a 13-year-old anyway. (I wasn’t intentionally lying. I honestly didn’t think any surgeon would do such a thing. And frankly, I assumed she’d change her mind by the time she turned 18.) Luckily, she left it that.

What bothered me more than the binder was the way she began to obviously shun everything feminine, even things she’d loved before. Gone were the fun dresses and the wild, multi-color tights. Her glittery pink (faux) Doc Martens and her red cowboy boots stayed hidden in the closet. Her once adored Pink Ladies jacket went unworn. She’d only wear black leggings and oversized, boxy t-shirts. I’d gone through an all-black phase in seventh grade too (trying to be super metal, much to my parents’ dismay), so I told myself it didn’t matter.

But not long after, I found out Kristin went by Kyle among her friends. They also referred to her as “he.” And then came the day I found my daughter dramatically despondent on the couch. (There’s always a level of drama with her. She was a theater kid, after all.) She said to me, “Mom, what if I really am a boy?”

I remember the moment of panic I felt. The feeling that I had to be so, so careful. I said, “Honey, I knew all along you were gay. If you were truly trans too, I would know. Kids who have actual, honest-to-god gender dysphoria show signs from the time they’re three or four. You never did.”

She said she didn’t “feel like” other girls. I emphasized that this was an assumption on her part. There was no way of knowing how other girls felt. She brought up the monster trucks. I countered that sure, she was a bit of a tomboy in some things, but that didn’t make her a boy. I basically kept repeating some version of the lines I’d been saying her whole life: “There’s no one way to be a girl. You can be any kind of girl you want to be.”

I don’t remember much about how the rest of the conversation went, but it ended well enough. She hugged me and agreed that maybe she wasn’t trans. Maybe she was just “non-binary.”

Fine, I thought. Call it what you want. Just don’t ask me to pretend you’re a boy.

Then came high school.

By this point, the rest of the Rainbow Crew had begun following Thadeus’ lead, cycling through the letters of the ever-growing alphabet. One day they’d be asexual, the next they’d be poly. One day they’d be bi, the next day they’d be gay. Without exception, every girl in the group used either he/him or they/them pronouns. They changed their names so often, I had a hard time keeping up with who was who. I once posited to my daughter that there was no way every kid in her friend group could truly suffer from gender dysphoria. That wasn’t statistically possible. My daughter rolled her eyes and said something along the lines of, “You just don’t get it, mom.”

She was right. I didn’t. But there was no ignoring the social aspect of it. The Rainbow Crew were all from white, affluent households. In a world obsessed with grievance politics and intersectionality, alphabet identities gave them social collateral they didn’t otherwise have.

At a parent/teacher conference that year, one of the teachers told us Kristin was more independent and cared a lot less about what her friends thought than most girls her age. I would have felt better about that if I hadn’t known for a fact that she squashed every “girly” part of herself to fit into her friend group. Then the teacher asked me if I knew Kristin went by Kyle at school. I said I knew her friends called her a nickname but didn’t realize it extended beyond that. I didn’t realize teachers were using it as well. I waffled back and forth on how I felt about this, but in the end, decided it wasn’t a hill I was willing to die on.

Then, just a few days after turning sixteen, Thadeus underwent a double mastectomy.

Kristin sent me a text from school that day saying how happy they all were for him. They planned to get a cake for his first day back at school. Kristin asked if I’d take her to the store to order it. (She wasn’t sixteen yet and so couldn’t drive there on her own.) I honestly felt sick to my stomach thinking about the damage done to Thadeus’ body. How could any parent allow such a radical surgery at such a young age? Even more alarming was the fact that his friends were celebrating it, as if removing healthy body parts was a wonderful, normal milestone.

I took her to buy the cake that afternoon, but in the car, I told her I worried about how much they all idolized Thadeus. If Thadeus was really just being “his authentic self,” why did it need to be celebrated so much? I pointed out that Kristin was always her “authentic self” but nobody bought her a cake for it. Exactly one girl in the Rainbow Crew had gone back to identifying as she/her and using her given name. I asked why we weren’t buying a cake for her too, since she’d apparently found her “authentic self” as well.

I don’t know if any of these comments sank in or not. She was clearly annoyed at me. She sulked and rolled her eyes as only a fifteen-year-old girl can. When she pointedly changed the subject, I let the matter drop.

Then Covid happened, her high school years interrupted. She was home with us through the insanity of the 2020. She became both more and less political, finding she disagreed with her friends about JK Rowling, about the protests, about the vaccine. It was the first crack between her and the Rainbow Crew, but at the same time, they were in constant contact via their phones and Discord. Any wrongthink resulted in people being muted or even kicked off the Discord server until they’d properly atoned for their sins. Her friends were still the center of her world, but she learned to keep her opinions to herself.

Her school was fully open again in fall of 2020, when she started her junior year. She talked about whether or not she’d go to prom. If she did, she assured me, we’d have to rent her a tux. She refused to wear a dress of any kind. That broke my heart. I had of course dreamed of taking her shopping, watching her try on all the dresses. I told myself those were my dreams, not hers, and it didn’t really matter. I cried about it, but not in front of her. (In the end, Thadeus didn’t go to prom, and so none of the Rainbow Crew went. We didn’t have to worry about the tux vs. dress issue that year.)

Sometime in early spring of 2021, my husband and I went to an art show she was part of. While there, one of her friends made a point of telling me, “You keep saying ‘she.’ Kyle prefers to go by he/him.” I was a bit taken aback that a high schooler would challenge me on the identity of my own daughter. I said Kristin could do whatever she wanted at school, but I wasn’t going to pretend she was a boy. I could tell the friend found this beyond shocking. More than anything, the friend seemed flabbergasted that a parent might push back.

At that point, I knew the conversation was coming. I knew it was only a matter of time before my daughter brought it up herself.

I still wasn’t ready for it when it happened.